The mystery of the body in the Brighton beach hut

Beach Hut 512, from Brighton-based Dorothy, comes out on July 1 (ebook and audiobook £1.99), published by Amazon Original Stories.

For the past six months, a wave of vandalism has plagued Brighton seafront’s iconic beach huts. The spree takes a chilling turn when Sims Rumakah returns from a dreadful date to find her hut destroyed – and shockingly, the police have discovered a body inside. The victim has been dead for two months. However, Sims hasn’t set foot in her hut for three months. Who is this person, and how could they have ended up in her locked beach hut?

As the police investigate, and nosy beach hut residents gossip about the mystery, Sims begins to suspect this isn’t random. Someone put that body in her hut for a reason. As she delves into the truth, she’s forced to confront not just the secrets buried in the tight-knit, toxic beach hut community but also the ghosts of her own past.

“I have lived in Brighton for nearly 20 years,” Dorothy says. “I came back from Australia in 2007 and I have lived here ever since. I just thought why not Brighton. That's what it came down to. I lived in London before I went to Australia and I was in Australia for two years but I didn't want to go back to my flat in south London. I thought I wanted to go somewhere else and Brighton is a great place. I knew people who loved it and I do too. Most places you're only 20 minutes from the sea. You've got the sea and that's the main thing and there are great shops and most people seem quite chilled and accepting though that is actually changing a bit. But you’ve also got the beach huts!

“I've always been obsessed with the beach huts. You always wonder what is happening inside them when the doors are closed. It's amazing in the summer when there's a real carnival atmosphere especially over the June and July weekends and you see people sitting outside having tea or playing cards with groups of friends. And actually I do have friends who have beach huts. A group of us for my birthday went down there and made cocktails and had a great time. It was getting colder and colder as the evening wore on but I remember looking out at the sea and watching people, and it was fantastic.

“But I was just walking past the beach huts and I was just wondering what goes on inside them when the doors are shut and I started thinking what if there was a body in one of them. And that was the germ of the idea for the story. I could not see it as a full-on novel, like 100,000 words, but it stuck in my mind every time I walked past. I started going through the what if process which is how I write, thinking what if there was a body in there and what if it had been in there for a relatively long time and the owner has not been there for a while.

“Sims realises that somebody has targeted her. It's about her. It is about the fact that she has been through something in the past. Normally if you find something dodgy in a beach hut, obviously you would think what is going on but I just wanted her to immediately wonder if her past is actually catching up with her. She is a scientist and when we meet her she has been on a date and the date is has not gone very well. She is a scientist who is obsessed with chemistry and loves the physical sciences but she has a sketchy past and I don't want to give away too much!

“Brighton is a fantastic place to set a story, partly because of the sea and partly because so many different types of people come here…”

Publication events include: 4th July - Brighton Girls School, Brighton and 11th July - Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham.

Dorothy is an award-winning, internationally bestselling author and journalist whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages, with sales that exceed two million copies in the UK alone (as reported by her publisher, Headline). Her third novel, My Best Friend's Girl was selected for the Richard & Judy Summer Reads Book Club, while a TV adaptation based on The Ice Cream Girls aired on ITV in 2013.